


Sundered

by never_shuts_up



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambrolleigns if you really want it, Blood and Injury, Giant Robots Punching Sea Monsters, Trauma, plus un-named Finn Balor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 04:03:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14300355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/never_shuts_up/pseuds/never_shuts_up
Summary: A Shield x Pacific Rim!AU drabble.When their jaeger goes down and their drift connection is severed, the pilots of Cerberus Delta have to find each other on the open ocean, and find their way to land.





	Sundered

**Author's Note:**

> This wouldn't exist without Nadia (artsy-hobbitses on tumblr, oniwanbashu on Twitter) and the Shield x Pacific Rim art she teased us with - a thing I didn't know I needed until I saw it. This could become part of something larger (but probably won't).

The last thing he remembered before the blinding flash of the drift connection being severed, the crunch of twisted metal and the searing pain that shot through his leg -  _ its leg? Their leg? - no, just his  _ \- was the creature’s tail. A rush of shimmering scales, purple-green in the headlamp, with a wicked spiny club on the end. The kaiju was missing a few limbs and bleeding copiously enough to turn the churning waves an eerie phosphorescent blue, and as it started to sink beneath the freezing water, Ambrose had let out a celebratory whoop of glee before Reigns had shushed him, they had to make good and sure it was -

Dead.

How fitting that was the last word that had come into his head before he saw it, before he heard and felt that  _ scream _ .

Judging from the stillness of the water, the thing had either sank to the bottom unconscious or limped back to the Breach to lick its wounds. It wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t either, at least not yet.

The shock of the impact, of being ripped out of the drift, and of hitting the water had blended into one. He couldn’t feel his crewmen, his brothers, when only seconds before they had been three working as one. They had been one. And now that was gone. And he was floating, surrounded by the rubble that had once been part of their mech, their survival, their life.

He had only been forcibly pulled out of the drift once before, in a training exercise gone awry, before he had even met Ambrose and Reigns, and didn’t remember that incident too clearly, but surely it was nothing like this. His head rang and felt two-thirds empty, and every nerve tingled and burned, but the main source of hurt was deep in his chest, as if something had been ripped out, and it ached hollowly, as he’d imagined a phantom limb might feel.

His body didn’t seem to work on its own anymore, and while the inner layer of the suit kept him afloat, that was about all it could do. He tried to move his arms - yes, those could move enough to tread water a little - then his legs - and an anguished scream tore from him as pain lanced out from his right knee, deadening his entire leg from hip to toes.

Trying to breathe normally through clenched teeth, even though breathing normally made something in his ribcage burn and twinge, he pointed himself in the vague direction of the rocky Vancouver coastline, or at least a vague dark shape with a few small lights that looked about the right shape. He fumbled with the com button on the neckline of the suit, with the earpiece on the shattered wreck that was once his helmet, but there was nothing - not even static. The lights kept doubling, then resolving themselves, then doubling again, and it was very hard to keep his eyes focused and his mind inside  _ himself _ instead of trying to float back into a drift, a  _ they, _ that no longer was. He could see another small light in the water, blue and flickering, bobbing on the dark waters, and he knew, he just knew it had to be from the suits of one of his brothers, and tried to swim toward it, but his leg gave out working against the current, and the raw noise he heard himself make was somewhere between an anguished human cry and a purely animal howl. 

A voice answered it, a voice that was a single rope, a lifeline thrown within arm’s reach.

“Seth? SETH!”

The most he could manage to shout, hoarsely, was “Here! I’m here!” Even though he had no idea what “here” meant anymore, and even though speaking meant getting another mouthful of cold salt water.

The light was moving toward him now, faster, and before he knew it he could see Roman’s face, barely lit by the emergency light on his shoulder. The larger man was shivering, so his suit was probably taking on icy water too, and blood trickled from beneath his helmet, from a cut on his temple.

Still treading water, and still breathing hard from the effort of fighting against the waves, Roman grabbed Seth by the shoulders and pressed their foreheads together. Relief flooded through him at the touch, filling some of the empty places inside. “You scared me, Uce. When that tail hit our right side I thought you were dead. You all right? Can you swim?”

“No. My leg’s all fucked.” The worried lines on Roman’s face dug in deeper. “You?”

“Been worse. Something got me in the shoulder, but I can still swim.” It was only then that Seth noticed how badly crushed the right shoulder of Roman’s suit was, whether from the kaiju’s tail or the shrapnel or something else.

It was only then that Seth dared to ask, and he couldn’t without his words quaking and faltering. “W-where’s Dean?”

Roman’s voice sounded brittle and hoarse in the cold air. “I don’t know, Uce. I don’t know.”

Suddenly, Roman’s com speaker let out a few bursts of crackling static, followed by a familiar voice. “Cerberus Delta, is anybody still out there? Do you copy?”

“Copy, Lunatic, this is Big Dog. We’re both here, but Architect lost his comm. What’s your status?” The wind was picking up now, but the iron-gray swells of the waves were carrying them closer to shore, and every little bit counted.

Dean’s response crackled back. “I just made landfall. Not sure where, can’t see the rendezvous. Little banged up.” Seth wanted to sigh with relief, but knowing Dean and his general lack of regard for pain or self preservation, this could mean anything from a few bruises to a fractured spine. “I’m setting up a beacon for the evac, can you swim towards it?” 

“We can, just not very fast. Suits are all fucked up, and Seth’s hurt.”

It was a tense few seconds before Dean responded. “I’ll see what I can do. Hold up.”

As they watched small red light sputtered to life on the shore. Roman thumbed the comm button again. “Lunatic, we’re about one point five knots south of the beacon, coming for you but I can’t promise we’ll be close. You copy?”

“Copy, Big Dog.” 

An idea from their training days flickered across Seth’s mind. “What do you say, I do the arm parts, you get the legs?”

“Like an awkward fucking jaeger.” Roman grinned, and wrapped an arm around Seth’s waist, trying to support the injured leg and keep his own shoulder out of harm’s way. It was rough going, and awkward to keep each other’s limbs from jostling and colliding, but Roman was the strongest swimmer of the three and Seth found himself able to manage some decent strokes around in the dented plates of the suit. Soon they were moving toward the shore, slowly, but synchronized well enough. 

Seth had lost track of the time and distance by the time they reached the shore, feeling only the rise of rocks and sand under him as the waves receded, and suddenly Dean’s hands were on him, easing him up from the water, holding onto him tightly in a bear hug, and even though everything was still fading in and out and  _ hurt _ so much, it was complete again. And the three of them stayed, still shivering in the wet cold, foreheads pressed together, tears of relief adding to the salt on their faces, grateful hands clinging, no words because nobody needed them, until the beating of the helicopter blades grew closer, and the evac unit landed on a rocky plateau a hundred yards away. In the distance, more helicopters could be heard - an extraction crew, for what was left of the fourth member of their team, Cerberus Delta herself. Seth caught Roman looking up at them, and out across the water and incoming fog to where their jaeger would have fallen, but Dean tugged him back down into a fierce embrace.  _ That wasn’t important right now _ .

The medic who deftly climbed across the rocks to them was hard to distinguish in all his cold weather gear, and wasn’t one they’d ever met before, but he had the widest smile and the most distractingly blue eyes Seth had ever seen, and spoke with a lilting accent that his exhausted brain couldn’t quite place.  He accepted the reflective blanket the medic pulled from his bag, and all the questions and poking and prodding, biting back a pained whimper as the blue-eyed stranger splinted his leg, and another as he separated him from Dean and Roman’s careful hands to load him onto the stretcher.

In the helicopter, they were on each other again, huddled together under the reflective blankets, and even though the medic barely had space to work, his requests for them to move and allow him access to Seth’s ribs, Roman’s shoulder, and Dean’s various cuts and contusions didn’t hold a hint of complaint. The psychological effects of breaking the drift were well documented, and between the strength of their bond and the unknown future of their jaeger, he clearly had no intention of forcing them to separate. And it was pretty evident, from the safe, comfortable silence that filled the small craft as the engines kicked into gear, that he couldn’t if he’d tried.


End file.
